This specification relates to the presentation of search results in response to a search request presented by a user to a search service.
A search service, e.g., a web-based search service, will generally receive a search request from a user through a search page presented to the user by the service through a web browser on a personal computing device. In making the search request, the user will generally select a kind of resource to be searched—e.g., generic web pages, images, news, and so on—and in the absence of an explicit selection, a default selection, typically generic web pages, will be used. Generic web pages are uncategorized web pages, as opposed to, for example, news resources which are web pages categorized as a news resource. Some search services will present different search pages as user interfaces to receive search requests directed to searching different kinds of resources.
Upon receiving a search query, a search service will generally direct the search query to a search engine for a specific corpus of resources. A search engine is associated with a kind of resource, and will produce search results based on the query and on the kind of resource it is associated with. It ranks the search results based on their relevance to a query in the context of the corpus to which the query was directed.
Examples of corpora that search engines may search or be associated with include generic web pages, news, images, books, and videos.
A search engine that searches generic web pages produces web page search results. Each generic web page search result may contain one or more of the following attributes: a title of a web page, a hyperlink to the web page, a snippet of text showing search terms in bold, the size of the web page, a hyperlink to similar web pages, and a hyperlink to a cached version of the web page.
A search engine that searches news produces news search results. Each news search result may contain one or more of the following attributes: a title of the news resource, a hyperlink to the news resource, a snippet of text showing search terms in bold, the publication date and time of the news resource, an image, and links to similar news resources.
A search engine that searches images produces image search results. Each image search result may contain one or more of the following attributes: an image, a short description of the image, the size of the image, the resolution of the image, the image type, the source of the image, and a hyperlink to the source of the image.
A search engine that searches books produces book search results. In some implementations, what is searched are scanned copies of books, that is, the corpus includes text from scanned and parsed physical books, which is referenced from the book search results. Each book search result may contain one or more of the following attributes: a title of the book, a hyperlink to the book, an image, a hyperlink to a table of contents, a hyperlink to a first page of the book, an author, a publication date, and a hyperlink to an index of the book.
A search engine that searches videos produces video search results. Each video search result may contain one or more of the following attributes: a title of the video, a hyperlink to the video, an image, a rating for the video, the number of ratings made for the video, the publication date, a short description of the video, and the source of the video.
After the search engine produces the search results, the search service presents those results to the user. The format that the search service presents the results in typically varies according to the attributes of the search results. For example, the format of news search results typically differ from the format of generic web page search results.
When a user elects to search generic web pages, the search service may evaluate the user's search request to determine whether or not a news search result would likely be relevant to the user's request. If it would be relevant, the search service may use one search engine to search generic web pages, and use a different search engine to search news. Using the results produced by the two search engines, the search service presents to the user a news search result, followed by the generic web page search results.